By Rachel Hupp Cline | 5/21/2026

I saw something on Instagram this week that stopped me in my scroll. It was something like, “Midlife isn’t a crisis. It’s a chance to let go of everything that you were never meant to carry.” And that has been so true for me, because I think that a lot of us have been told that there’s something wrong with us for wanting more. That we’re tired because we’re not doing enough. That we’re restless because we just need a new goal, something new to strive towards. That we’re lost because we haven’t found the right plan.

But what if none of that is actually true? What if this season, this aching, beautiful, and confusing chapter that you’re in, is actually an invitation?

In this solo episode, I’m sitting down with you to name what I think is actually happening for so many of us in our late 30s, 40s, and 50s. Why we feel “soul tired.” Why I don’t think this chapter is a crisis at all, but a homecoming. And why so many women find yoga (the deeper practice, way beyond the poses) in exactly this season. You can watch on YouTube, listen on Spotify, or keep reading below.

Listen on Spotify: Midlife Isn’t a Crisis. It’s a Homecoming.

Why “What About Me?” Keeps Coming Up

Hello, friend, and welcome back to the podcast. I am your host, Rachel, and I’ve got another solo episode for you here. If you’re new here, I teach women how to come home to themselves through yoga, mindfulness, and a whole lot of meeting ourselves right where we are.

Today’s episode is one of those topics that’s been sitting on my heart for a while, and I have a feeling that it’s gonna land for you, too. We’re gonna be talking about why so many women find yoga in this specific season of life. Not the kind of yoga that’s about getting flexible or fitting in a class between meetings or on your lunch break. The deeper practice. The one that asks you to slow down enough to hear your inner voice. The practice that invites you to put some things down.

And I just wanna say this upfront, because nothing I share is about fixing anything about yourself. I don’t think you need fixing. What I think is that you’ve probably been carrying things that either were never yours to carry in the first place, or things that you’ve outgrown but you’re still used to carrying. And your body, your mind, your spirit are asking you to set some of that down.

The Woman I See Over and Over Again

Here’s what I see over and over again in the women who find their way to me. She’s the one who everyone calls when things fall apart. She holds it all together at work, at home, in her friendships, in her family. From the outside, her life looks really good, maybe even enviable. But she’s tired in a way that sleep just doesn’t fix. Not body tired. Soul tired. Tired of always being the strong one. Tired of that quiet hum of something’s missing that she can’t quite name and she can’t seem to outrun.

She’s tried a lot of the things. So many things. She’s read the books and downloaded the apps. She put meditation on her to-do list and then felt guilty when it didn’t happen. She started a few programs, maybe more than a few. She didn’t finish them, and then she held that against herself. And underneath all of that, there’s this question that keeps coming up. A lot of times late at night. Maybe in the car. Maybe on a random Wednesday morning when she’s brushing her teeth and the house is quiet for a minute or two.

What about me?

And then almost immediately, “Who am I to even ask that? I have so much to be grateful for.” If you’ve ever heard that question float through your mind, even just for a second, I want you to know that I see you. I’ve been her. I am her some days still. And so I invite you to hear this.

The Tiredness That Sleep Can’t Fix

So take a breath with me right here, and let that be true. You’re waking up. Go ahead and inhale. And let it go.

That tiredness that you feel, it’s not weakness. It’s wisdom. Your body, your spirit, they’re telling you that the way that you’ve been living, the way that you were taught to live, the way that asks you to keep doing more and being more and giving more, it’s simply not sustainable. And some deeper part of you is starting to push up through the soil and ask for something different.

Why Yoga, Why This Season

Now, you might be wondering why I’m talking about yoga in an episode about midlife and tiredness and unbecoming. It’s because yoga, the deeper practice, not just the poses, is one of the most ancient pathways we have for this exact work. The unbecoming.

One of my favorite quotes about it goes like this: “Yoga is the journey of the self, through the self, to the self.”

That has been my experience of the practice for over 25 years now, and it’s what I get to witness in the women that I teach. Yoga’s really not about touching your toes. It’s not about trying to look a certain way on the mat or get a pose just right. It’s not even about trying to be calm all the time. Because let’s be real. It’s just not possible. None of us is calm all the time.

A Practice to Come Home

Yoga offers us a practice to come home toward ourselves. To come home to ourselves. It teaches us to slow down enough to actually pay attention. Not just to our body, but to who we actually are underneath all of that noise that surrounds us every single day. And the noise is loud, right? The expectations. The roles that you play or have played. The shoulds. The voices that taught you that good women give, and good women keep it together, and good women don’t ask for more than they’re handed.

The Slow Work of Unbecoming

Here’s the part that I think gets missed in mainstream wellness conversations. One of the deepest threads of this practice is the work of unbecoming. It’s the slow, gentle, and, let’s be real, sometimes uncomfortable work of putting down the version of yourself that either you have outgrown, or perhaps you feel like was never your role to begin with. Maybe you feel like it wasn’t the path that you would have chosen. It was a path somebody else chose for you.

Maybe you’ve been the over-giver, the prover, the one who’s always earning her right to take up space. So the practice is letting go of who you thought you had to be, so you can finally reconnect with who you actually are. And that woman, she’s been there the whole time. Underneath the doing and the proving and the tiredness, she’s waiting.

And I think that’s why so many women find yoga in their late 30s and 40s and 50s and beyond. Something deep inside them is ready to come home, and the body knows the way back even when the mind has forgotten.

What’s Actually Bringing Women to This Work

Before I get deeper into the why of yoga, I wanna name just a few things that I see bringing women to this work.

One is the emotional overload. That weight of unaddressed feelings that are draining our energy and making it harder to find that sense of balance in our day-to-day.

How about the overthinking? I’m raising my hand here. The mental clutter that keeps you from sleeping at night and from making clear decisions during the day. The kind that has you trying to think your way through something that needs you to feel your way through it.

And then autopilot. Moving through your days without actually being in them. Without actually experiencing the moments. Missing the moments that matter. Feeling disconnected, not only from yourself, but also from the people around you.

The Message We’ve Absorbed

And then underneath it all, that exhausting message that we’ve absorbed somewhere along the way. “Oh, you just need to work harder, do more, be more, and then maybe then we’ll be happy.” We start seeking that happiness outside of ourselves in our careers, our relationships, our achievements, all the things that we accumulate. Telling ourselves that this one, the next one, the next milestone, that’s finally gonna be the one that fills our cup.

But here’s the deeper truth, and I keep coming back to this. At our core, we all want the same things. We all wanna be happy. We just wanna be happy. We wanna feel truly alive. And we wanna feel at peace, present in our own life.

Did your shoulders just soften a little when I said that? Bet you can relate. Let’s go ahead and inhale. Invite a little more length into your spine. Exhale. Let your shoulders soften.

Yoga, the deeper practice, the one that walks us home, is one of the ways that we get to that space of peace. Feeling truly alive. Finding that sense of contentment and presence in our day-to-day life.

Seven Reasons Women Find Yoga in Midlife

If you’re sitting with this and wondering if a deeper yoga practice might actually be what’s calling you, let me share some of the reasons that women say yes to this work. These are actual shifts that I have watched happen in real women’s lives.

1. A Roadmap to Real Purpose and Meaning

A full practice gives you a roadmap to real purpose and meaning. The kind that comes from actually knowing what matters to you and living from there.

2. Deeper Self-Trust and Self-Awareness

Yoga builds deeper self-trust and self-awareness, so you start to hear your inner voice again. You stop needing your husband or your mom or your boss to tell you you’re doing the right thing, because inside you already know.

3. Balance Between Effort and Ease

It teaches you how to balance effort with ease. Masculine structure and feminine flow. So you can stop forcing your way through your life and start moving and flowing with it instead.

4. Rediscovering Who You Are at Your Core

Yoga helps you rediscover who you are at your core. Underneath the roles, underneath the titles, underneath the versions of you that are here to serve everybody else. Just you. Who you are at your core.

5. Patterns Become Opportunities for Expansion

Yoga can help to shift negative patterns into opportunities for expansion. Those same thoughts that used to send you into a tailspin, instead you get curious. They become information instead of evidence piling up against yourself.

6. Reconnection to Intuition

Yoga connects you back to your intuition. Your inner voice. The inner knowing that you stopped trusting somewhere along the way. The wisdom that’s been there the whole time, just quieter than all that outside noise.

7. Deepening Connection to Everything That Matters

Yoga deepens connection to yourself, to the people you love, to source, whatever you consider that to be. To your own body, mind, spirit, no longer fragmented. And then maybe the simplest one, but the biggest one. It helps you to feel truly alive and at peace.

What Coming Home Actually Feels Like

Let me paint you a picture of what life can actually feel like when you’ve done this work. When you’ve come home to yourself.

You wake up in the morning, and before you reach for your phone, you feel your own body in the bed for a second. You take a real breath. You take the time to meet yourself before the day pulls at you.

You’re still you. You still move fast when you need to. You still have your full life, the calendar and the kids and the meetings and the inbox. But there’s something different underneath the movement now. A steadiness of breath. You’re not forcing or bracing your way through your day. You’re actually in it.

Actually Tasting Dinner

You sit down to dinner, and you’re really there. Not half listening to your kids or your husband’s story while mentally writing tomorrow’s to-do list. You’re actually tasting your food, savoring your bites. You’re actually hearing the people you love. You’re in your own body, feeling your breath move in and out.

Yeah, anxiety’s still gonna show up. Sure, it always will. But now when it rises, you have tools to help calm it, to help tame it. You breathe. You come back to your body, and you don’t lose the next few hours to it. You keep moving with your day, but you’re a little bit more anchored, a little bit more grounded than you used to be.

You make a decision from your gut, and you don’t second-guess it for three days. You feel a wave of joy, and you actually stay in it. You don’t rush past it to the next thing on your list. You let it land.

You wake up on an ordinary Thursday morning, and there’s this quiet knowing in you that says, “Yes. Yes, I’m in here. This is mine. I’m actually living this life.”

Can you imagine that for yourself even just for a second? What glimpses do you already have? What might still be feeling like it might be missing?

Svadhyaya: The Practice of Self-Study

A big part of how this happens is a practice yoga calls svadhyaya. Self-study. It’s one of the niyamas, the personal practices, and it’s exactly what it sounds like. It’s the slow, honest work of paying attention to who you actually are. And we’re not talking about judging yourself. It’s about awareness. Getting to know yourself, because you can’t come home if you don’t know where you’re starting from. You can’t come home to someone you don’t know. That’s the work. That’s what this practice opens up. And it does not happen overnight.

By our age we’re probably done with all the quick fixes, right? We’ve tried them all. We’re looking for sustainable practices we can embody and integrate into our busy modern lives, and yoga offers us those tools. It’s not gonna happen because you tried harder or you willed it into being. It happens because you finally gave yourself permission to come home.

Radiantly Rooted: A Yogic Pathway Home to You

If something inside of you is nodding along to all of this, I wanna tell you about something. Just this week, I opened the doors to my signature program. It’s Radiantly Rooted: A Yogic Pathway Home to You. I named it that because radiantly rooted is the energy this whole work cultivates. Rooted in who you actually are at your core. Radiant from the inside out, because you finally know who you are again.

It’s everything I’ve been talking about today in one beautifully held space. It’s a self-paced journey through practices that have literally changed my life and the lives of the women that I get to walk beside. Yoga, meditation, breathwork, journaling, and the deeper teachings that help you actually embody yoga as the path home, to guide you back to the core and truth of who you are. Who you are. The pieces that got lost perhaps along the way.

The Eight Stages of Coming Home

It’s structured around these stages of coming home. We arrive, we gather, we root, we trust, we rise, we awaken, we radiate, and then we tend to all of those stages that came before.

Every one of those stages is designed to help you put down what’s no longer yours to carry. Some of it maybe never even belonged to you in the first place, and yet we picked it up. Some of it probably did once, but you’ve outgrown it by now. The roles, the responsibilities, the titles, those versions of you that just don’t fit anymore. So you can reconnect with who you’ve always been underneath all of it.

You also get a full year of support inside the program, and that includes my monthly women’s circle, the Radiantly Rooted Journal, a chakra guide, and a few limited time bonuses that I’m offering right now.

Before You Go

Before you go, I just wanna leave you with this. There’s nothing wrong with you. You’re not behind. You’re not too late. I’m gonna say that again. You’re not too late. So many of us think that we are.

You’re a woman who is in a season of profound becoming, and she needs to be rooted in who she actually is, and she needs space to be radiant. She didn’t have to earn it. That’s who she actually is. That’s what she actually is at her core, beneath all the weight she’s been carrying.

That’s the work I get to walk women through inside Radiantly Rooted. So if anything in this episode stirred something in you, I want to invite you in. Head on over to rachelhupp.com/radiantlyrooted.

I’m so glad that you spent this time with me. Before you go, take one more deep breath with me. Go ahead, right where you are. Just one. Inhale. And let it go. Until next time, breathe mindfully, be gentle with yourself, and remember,

Frequently Asked Questions

What does it mean when “What about me?” keeps coming up in midlife?

For many women in their late 30s, 40s, and 50s, that quiet question is part of a deeper season of becoming. In the Radiantly Rooted approach, it’s seen as an invitation to put down what was never yours to carry, or what you may have outgrown, and reconnect with who you actually are underneath it all. (If you’re navigating depression, anxiety, or burnout that feels bigger than a season, please also reach out to a qualified mental health professional. This work is meant to walk alongside that kind of support, not replace it.)

Why do so many women find yoga later in life?

Because by this season, we’re done with quick fixes and surface-level wellness. Something deeper is asking to be heard. Yoga, the deeper practice beyond the poses, offers women a sustainable path back to themselves. It teaches us to slow down, hear our inner voice, and put down the roles and expectations we’ve outgrown so we can reconnect with who we actually are.

What is the difference between the physical postures and the “deeper practice” of yoga?

A lot of mainstream yoga focuses on the physical postures, called asana, getting flexible, or fitting in a class between meetings or at lunch. The deeper practice includes the postures, and also draws on meditation, breathwork (pranayama), self-study (svadhyaya), and the slow work of unbecoming the version of yourself you’ve outgrown. It’s a path home to yourself, not just a workout.

Do I have to be flexible or experienced to start a yoga practice like this?

No. There’s actually very little asana practice in Radiantly Rooted. It’s not about touching your toes or perfecting a pose. We’re going deeper into yoga philosophy that meets you exactly where you are, and much of the work happens on the inside. If you have a current injury or health condition, please check in with your doctor before starting any new movement practice, and always honor what your body is telling you in any moment.

What is Radiantly Rooted, and how do I join?

Radiantly Rooted: A Yogic Pathway Home to You is Rachel’s self-paced signature program built around the eight stages of coming home: arrive, gather, root, trust, rise, awaken, radiate, and tend. You get yoga, meditation, breathwork, journaling, and a full year of support, including the monthly women’s circle, the Radiantly Rooted Journal, and a chakra guide. The doors are open right now, with launch bonuses through Sunday, May 25, 2026. Step into Radiantly Rooted here.

? One breath, one moment at a time, we return to ourselves. ?